Encountering change

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Everybody in the book is completely changed, no one more so than the two main characters."
Amitav Ghosh

A preoccupation with the meeting and understanding of cultures defines Amitav Ghosh's new book.

Five years ago when he was visiting the Sunderbans, that delta part of West Bengal that is a mess of islands and rivers known collectively as the Mouths of the Ganges, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh saw in his mind's eye a foreign girl encountering a local fisherman. It was to be the visual image that inspired his latest novel, The Hungry Tide.

His writing is often prompted by an image and the story follows as he "unpacks" that image and follows its implications into various and sometimes surprising directions - in this case the clash of western and traditional sensibilities, the conflicting demands of the human and animal worlds, and the precariousness of survival in the face of a hostile and unpredictable environment.

He has long been interested in what he calls the "first encounter" narrative. In The Hungry Tide it is between Piya, an American of Indian parentage, a cetologist in pursuit of the river-based Irrawaddy dolphin, and Fokir, an illiterate local fisherman. Ghosh was intrigued by the idea of someone from the wider world plunging into circumstances where they have no means of communication with a very local culture.

The Hungry Tide is the story of Piya and Fokir and Kanaii, a sophisticated Delhi-based translator visiting his aunt Nilima who lives on an island where she runs a local welfare trust. Her husband, Nirmal, a poet and one-time political activist, is dead, killed in a massacre of refugees, and Kanaii has come to read his account of the lead-up to the event that has been left to him.

The other main player is the landscape that determines so much in the characters' lives. That precarious part of the world, subject to tides and cyclones that can wash away islands on a daily basis, is forever changing. Human life is cheap; 300,000 people killed in the 1970 cyclone, a figure that still staggers Ghosh.

And in addition there is the threat of the tigers, which he says take a couple of people each week. "The strange thing about the Sunderbans is that the tiger's presence is everywhere; you feel it all the time - it's like being in a haunted house, but you never see it. People say the moment you see the tiger it's the last thing you ever see."

At one point Kanaii quotes a line from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke - "Life is lived in transformation" - that encapsulates the book. Not only are the characters transformed but so are their physical surroundings.

"Everybody in the book is completely changed, completely transformed - the landscape and the island. No one more so than Piya and Kanaii as well. They come to recognise that the ordinary anchorings of the world are not as they imagined."

Ghosh writes in English - "almost a default language for me" - but Bengali is his first language. He doesn't write in it because he wasn't educated in literary Bengali but when he was writing The Hungry Tide felt as if he was translating it into English. It was something to do with the "tactile feel of Bengali prose".

He is uncomfortable about writing in English, worrying that it could limit his writing about India. He talks about how easy it is for writers in English to approximate dialect. "But Bengali dialect is a dialect within a language that is unknown to English so in what way do I recreate that sense of dialect in speech," he wonders.

He rejected presenting his characters' dialect as a failed version of a language because "a dialect is not a failed version of the language". Nor did he want simply to drop in Indian words to create a "masala English" because people who speak a dialect are not creating a "linguistic mish-mash; it's a pure dialect".

His solution came from Sanskrit poetics in which regional differences were suggested by characters speaking in different metres. There is one chapter in which Kanaii translates for the benefit of Piya a Bengali folk poem. Ghosh worked on it for a year; first translating it without the metre, then with, then doing it in couplets. "It was was an incredibly exciting thing to do."

What it means, he reckons, is that Indian writers are at the forefront of what literary practice will entail for the 21st century: "How do you represent linguistic variation when you are confronting something that is so heterogenous to be unrepresentable within your text?"

Ghosh spends part of the year in Calcutta, where he has a house, but lives mainly in New York, where he has been for more than 10 years. He says he feels great connection to a country that has been good to him. "I'm married to an American; my children are American."

Nevertheless, he has grave misgivings about the direction in which the country is moving. "I do think America today is launched on a disastrous course from which it will gain nothing and lose a great deal. And it's certainly also true that living in America today is not like when I first went there 10 or 11 years ago. It's a changed country completely. There is such an atmosphere of fear . . . that's manufactured - you can see it day to day - often by politicians. It's very sad."

When he was in Burma researching his previous book, The Glass Palace, he came to the unnerving conclusion that while most people considered Burma to be some sort of relic from the past, it actually represented the future. Burma, he decided, was the first country to be undone by terrorism.

"If you read about accounts of Burma in the '50s it seems like an augury of what the rest of the world experienced in the '90s - bombs going off, trains being derailed. The Burmese clung to some sort of judicial and civil institutions until 1962 when essentially the state collapsed. It's strange to say but I think terrorism can undo civil institutions.

"Burma is a standing example of the way that happens because suddenly every person becomes more interested. Security becomes paramount and then it's this pervasive climate of fear. People in the West wonder how the Burmese junta keep power. You know how they keep power? It's by creating fear. They say you lose out (or) there'll be terrorism. They essentially barter safety for authoritarianism."